Sola Bamis: The Tutorial

Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts’ center for contemporary arts in downtown Los Angeles, proudly presents actress and artist Sola Bamis with her newest work, The Tutorial.

Part social media livestream event, film/video installation, solo performance, and theater piece, The Tutorial is an irreverent and heartfelt original work that deconstructs and reimagines Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye. The work explores the idea of the self and the other while providing a digital litany for Black women’s survival in the face of Neoliberalism, Big Tech, Hollywood colorism, xenophobia, and cultural genocide. 

Sola’s multi-step skincare tutorial serves as an allegory to the processes of dehumanization that Black and Third World Women have faced, with the third and fourth steps exploring the effects of Jim Crow on our psyche and the implications of forced sterilization on our sexuality.